Dreaming of Baghdad
by shelter
Summary: One-shot. AU-ish, post-war. His family has survived wars and worse things. But a chance meeting turns with Cho escalates into the one thing that could bring him down. Set against the backdrop of the Iraq War.


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**DREAMING OF BAGHDAD  
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A Harry Potter One-shot

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><p><em>Disclaimer: Harry Potter belongs to, and is the rightful property of, J.K Rowling<em>

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><p><strong>1.<strong>

He catches sight of her – the result of a frantic, stray glance amidst chaos – as the streets flood with anti-war protesters.

As always, he thinks he is dreaming: ten thousand people flushing themselves and their opinions into an already overflowing street, and all he sees is her. Like a boom of clear sky in the midst of a thunderstorm. He thinks that his eyes have caught what they wanted to see, defending his senses from the invasion of noise, the push of multiple colours and banners like a visual sugar-rush, a thousand chimneys of breath rising in steamy puffs. Yet in between these spirals, he sees an opening, an opportunity to pursue the fading figure through the wall of people. He sees a possibility to catch up. He takes it.

The whistles, the repeated volleys of chanting, fired like missiles from long, red-faced young people with peace slogans flourishing across their chests, the armies mobilized to make a different kind battle against the floating shadow of war. He reminds himself he needs to read the papers more. The Muggle ones too: maybe _The__Times_, or at least something over the Internet. He politely angles himself against the angry faces and eager-to-do-something bodies, vaults pass someone asking him if he will march with them, tries to hand him a flower. He ignores him/ her.

The figure still walks on, ahead. She has one of those flowers – a white lily, he thinks – twirled in strap where the leather sling bag meets her shoulder. As the echoes and slogans group into a crescendo of mismatched voices, he surges forward. He narrows the distance to just two strides. He could say something. He could yell her name or what he thinks her name used to be (he is sure he remembers, right?). But he doesn't. He stabs a finger at her shoulder and says:

"Hey." And again for effect: "Hey."

He exhales for breath the exact moment she turns. From the stare he gets, he constructs the fault lines of her face into memory, piecing together a name, something – except:

"Hello. Hey."

She moves, just the eyebrows and the slightest tilt of her head. She says: "Wait. Aren't you?"

He tries to connect the words and then he replies with the person that threads two strangers on the street together.

"Yes. Harry's."

"Then – then. Oh. Then – Weasley. Isn't it?"

He nods. The noise from the crowd behind him redirects her attention, and he looks at the edges of her eyes: thin lines. He moves on to her eyes, thinks of pearls in shallow water, but she turns back.

"I'm sorry. It's been years since the war. I can't recall –"

"Ron Weasley, and – Mrs?"

"Miss Cho Chang, you mean."

This exchange of names almost makes them extend hands, almost makes him grasp her whiter skin with courtesy. But he knows: they are not strangers. Instead, he tries to smile, but she beats him to it.

"Fancy meeting in this kind of place, eh?" he says, when he has nothing else to say really.

"Yeah it is."

"Well –"

"Yes, well. Need to rush. Get ahead of the roadblocks. See you, Weasl – Ron."

She's already turning before he can say "see you too." But she waves in return, and swings away from him. He watches her stride down the street, past more people shouting slogans and amassing till she finally disappears. On the way home, all he can think of are her eyes: not pearls in shallow water, but more like windows in the sun after the rain.

When he arrives back Burrow, the children usher him with hellos. Hermione gives him a kiss on the edge of his mouth. But he feels he's still short of breath.

* * *

><p><strong>2.<strong>

The next time he sees her he suffers from a crisis of choice. It's the first time in a while he feels the pressure of choice. Here she is: just three days later. She walks down the same triangle of streets as the last time. Only this time he's late – by several seconds – and now, post-work with all the traffic, he knows he won't be making a hundred metre sprint to say hello.

But he wants to. He watches the square of her back – neatly outlined by the straps of the bag she carries – blink at him. The vertical crease her bag makes, and the little movements her shoulders make as she moves her arms. She walks into a crowd, and he follows, the increasing distance between them pressing at him to keep walking.

He almost loses her in the chaos of the rush hour city. His eyes scramble as if he were on fire, thrown in a 360-degree survey, and when they stop, he lands on her face as she boards a shuttle. He thinks of pearls. And as her face settles in the window, she clears a cloud of hair from her forehead.

It takes him some time to realize he's missed his bus.

* * *

><p><strong>3.<strong>

He entertains Harry every Sunday, sometimes with the children, sometimes just with Hermione. At their place, with James and Hugo dogfighting with their brooms in the air, and Rose constantly interrupting their 'adults-only' conversation, he has to wait until he and Harry can be alone.

But Harry, fresh from completing an overseas assignment with the Auror Department, generously obliges anyone's questions of his most recent adventures – in particular, his assignments to the dark hazy place in his mind called the Middle East.

It takes all afternoon, and all evening. But he finally finds Harry alone as they watch the news over the television. Ron lowers the volume, and asks:

"You remember Cho Chang?"

He sees Harry twitch. Just for a second – the almost soundless movements from the screen bouncing off his face – and he recovers immediately. He turns to him, eyes clouded with reflected images. Ron notices his good friend has coaxed his face into the slightest of frowns.

"Yeah. What about her?"

"Met her on the way home from work just a few days' back."

"Still taking the bus, Ron? Isn't Floo much faster?"

"Seriously."

Harry turns back to the television. Ron waits, not sure where this conversation will go. A spiraling reading of news and a flashy, saturated report of anti-war protests in foreign cities far away soak the silence between them

"Harry?"

"This is a weird conversation to bring up, isn't it?"

"Just letting you know."

When Harry does not turn back at him, Ron sees his closest friend, centuries removed from their days at Hogwarts by war, and age. His children call for him outside. And then Hermione's voice joins in their chorus.

"You're right."

"What?"

Ron straightens his fingers. "This is bloody weird to talk about."

He makes it only halfway out of his living room, before he sees Hermione with his youngest. She loudly tells him something about a broom being broken, the mass of gnomes still hiding the undergrowth, a missing key and how she loves him. He takes Rose in his arms, and his fingers accidentally trail Hermione's skin. It's electric, it's moist with summer sweat, it's warm like deflected waves of sunlight shifting through the curtains –

But when he next sees Harry, he says:

"She's living in this city. Alone. That's all I know."

And: "Ron, I know this sounds bad of me. But be careful."

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><p><strong>4.<strong>

The tension between Muggle governments does not go away. The protests continue. War seems imminent.

He reads this while anti-war demonstrations obstruct traffic from the Ministry office. Harry's owl is delayed. There's supposed to be instructions for him and division to do an escort assignment. He flips his wand. It slides along the web of flesh between his fingers. He waits.

When the owl does not come, he leaves his table, his office, his section. He heads for a balcony in another section of the Auror's Department. Outside, a portion of the sun forms a triangle against the far edge, cut off from him by the brooding buildings and towers on this side of the city. The air is, however, heavy with the smell of burnt plastic. Somewhere in between his window and home, he knows a lot of action on the streets is taking place. He can hear them: voices like waves bashing into the sand, the screech of whistles and other halting mechanical chatter.

Ron does not want to wait. He tells his colleagues to inform him if Harry's owl arrives. He's out from under the Ministry's canopy of interlocking ceilings and into the back alley where the noise funnels in a single sweep from one end another. The air is buzzing, like something waiting to happen. He jogs towards the noise.

The crowd, he sees, overwhelms everything in its path. It's the same slogans, the same chants as last time, but the crowd moves like a battering ram, a fortress impenetrable, swallowing the road and the buildings. He must be at the epicentre of the protest, he thinks. He sees other pedestrians either joining the crowd or completely making an about-turn. He's about to do the same but –

There she is, again – he believes it's really too convenient that it has to happen like this – she's retreating from the crowd, but he sees her sweeping glances and he thinks she isn't too sure where should she go. Behind her, the slowly marching mass laps at her paces. Yet she moves - now, much more – with the quiet stylistic grace that he remembers Cho Chang to be.

He moves without thinking at all. All his Auror instincts kick in: first to target, first to draw, first one out. He sprints across the street, his arms thrusting out in great arcs before him, almost vaults across a kerb. He strides to keep up with her and clasps her shoulder.

The full force of her face hits him. It takes him a full second to absorb the flushed face, the slightly-parted lips, the single diamond of sweat slicing its way from her fringe down her cheek –

"This way!" he mouths.

When he moves, his arm extends, and the lack of resisting force reassures him she's following without much surprise. They cut across the street – and just at that second the demonstrators break out into a single clap of applause, all echoing the same words as they follow up with a flawless chorus of agreement:

"NO WAR!"

He brings her down the alley he came, back to where the Ministry's back door waits. But again, his old Auror training jumps into him: first to cover, first to ensure safety of non-combatant, and on impulse he turns into a separate street, clogged with parked cars and halts.

The heaving of their breaths fills the streets. Ron goes into a crouch, but recovers immediately. He rights himself. He sees her panting too: the white shirt she's wearing under her parted jacket rising, one hand tucked into the diagonal slash of her messenger bag across her chest.

"Weasley?" she breathes. "Anyone tell you that stunt was a bit crazy?" She breathes again, smoke unfurling from where he voices hits the air.

She stares at him. And he has to say something because he can't stand the stare.

"Want to get a drink?"

He sees they are still holding hands.

* * *

><p><strong>5.<strong>

Drawing from Harry's experience with her all those years back, Ron admits freely he holds a hazy impression of what talking to Cho Chang would be like: perhaps mumbling in circles, paying attention to body signs, especially those of someone emotional, and maybe even some sob story. So he is not prepared for her direct honesty.

They have a window seat at a place where he sits facing her. He plants his chin on his upended fists as she speaks, generously. Sometimes she turns to the window, the light pouring over the steep gradient of her cheekbones, as she talks to the scenery. On such moments, Ron finds his senses following the undulating, swift tone of her voice.

She says: "He didn't understand. So we believed it would be best to separate."

And: "Sometimes you get to a point where nothing works out at all."

She's to-the-point, the emotional tracers of these big events hardly registers on her face. He wonders why she's telling him this. Maybe it's the atmosphere – the rush of the moment perhaps? He doesn't run into a full scale protest everyday (although it's been twice now). He listens, waits, understands – without saying a single word at all. Instead, he tries not to think of how much Cho is different from his Hermione: the dark tea-coloured knuckles showing as she clasps her cup, the abstract dreamy glance always looking downward, her gaunt collarbone showing through the neck of her shirt like a clothes-hanger, the sweaty scent of her hair –

"Are you going to say anything?" she asks.

He does not reply, fearful some stray word out of his mouth will ruin everything. Instead he brings his eyes level to her face. As he expects, Cho meets his stare. This is the only thing he remembers now, like some abandoned schoolboy fantasy: Cho's gaze, eyes luminous, intense – sometimes too intense.

"If not, then thank you for – how do I put it? – saving me."

Cho breaks into the slightest of smiles, but quickly her face braces into a warning: "But I really think you just got lucky today."

Before he can even defend himself, she takes her jacket, adjusts her messenger bag and stands. Ron follows. She has her hair tucked into the collar of her jacket. Ron offers her a parting handshake.

Instead, she drops a kiss just below his ear. And, really, he knows it's supposed to mean something and nothing at the same time. Watching her stride out into the swirling debris of a road just passed by the demonstration, he keeps the phantom touch of her lips just below his ear from city to home – where the first thing he meets is Hermione, her hands warming his.

All he remembers are Cho's parting words: "We'll probably meet again, right?"

* * *

><p><strong>7.<strong>

When his meetings become routine, he settles into an uncertain compromise with the world within his house and outside. He contemplates everything: a confession, a declaration of his – he tries to figure it out carefully – emotional adultery. He wants to say something to Hermione. He wants to balance this against the reality that his life – and the world's – is near complete chaos. On some days he feels near-complete elation, the trickling static of holding hands with Cho, someone forbidden, someone foreign to everything he knows. But on the other hand, he can't bring himself to touch Hermione, to respond to her, to speak, to even be in her presence.

It's this fear, this indecisive uncertainty – he feels: this must be how it's like to live two lives in the space of one.

And Harry isn't around to help: the Ministry has sent him to where the action is, while keeping him on permanent standby as part of a local Auror battalion.

But he delays the truth. In the mornings, he kisses his Hermione as they symbolically part their separate ways for work. While in the evenings, he can count on meeting Cho at the same traffic junction. He still can't second-guess her moods or gestures: she's as erratic as the score at a Quidditch match, as colourful as the cars speeding by on the street.

All he remembers, though, is the kiss on the day of the protests. Soon, he thinks, soon some thing's going to give. Because, at work, he's preparing for war.

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><p><strong>8.<strong>

Everything happens within a few hours: the order from work, the farewell and Cho.

The order comes from the top, marked secret, and assigned straight to him by hand. He's given a far-away sounding place to be at, at a specific time, for a specific role: Basra – on the 10th of the month – for indefinite deployment. Move out, it says, the unit has been reassigned. When the brief clashes with the news reports, Ron knows this is it. He's going to see Harry soon. He's going to war.

He gathers all he needs for his trip away from the comfortable desk-bound job he has. He models himself after Harry, clearing deadlines, checking his Auror's supplies and confirming his chain of command. It's been years really – years – since he has been required to do something as serious as this. There's been no dark wizard after Voldemort, no emergency need for his Auror division to do anything except standby. But today's the day, and he leaves his office an hour earlier, his mind as taut as a wand poised to strike.

The next person to hear the news is Hermione: they are walking back down the street back to their home, evening starting to close around them, their neighbours' windows aglow with amber light. She nods, without breaking her stride. He looks over at her, seeing the shadows smoothen the sharpness of her eyes. He knows she's deep in thought. He knows she's not too happy. But he isn't sure what to say and they continue in silence.

It's only later – when he's told the children, made everyone prepared for his departure – that Hermione confronts him. She stands so close a lock of her hair brushes his face.

She sounds resentful: "I don't think you should always follow Harry into the fray."

"I'm an Auror, am I? Well you can say it to my boss when you see him at the send-off tomorrow."

"You won't forget us here, will you?" she says.

The question sounds almost strange to Ron. But when he realizes what he's going to do later, he tries to answer without the bubble of guilt within him. He knows it's not right.

"I'll write, everyday if possible, I promise," he tells her. "I'll even bring something back for Rose."

He means every word, but they still sound untruthful. And when Hermione's arms latch on his neck and when she anoints his forehead with a kiss, he feels undeserving. From up close, he looks – then averts – her eyes, his image pooling in them.

"It's a war there, Ron. People kill each other there, so please –" she says, almost pleading.

"I know."

"So please –"

"Hermione –"

She breaks the embrace. In the claustrophobia of their closeness, Ron reaches out and straightens her fringe – and she meets his outstretched fingers. He feels her skin under his fingers, lukewarm, chaste. He stares at her, his wife, waiting – waiting – he waits until she pulls away.

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><p><strong>9.<strong>

He deliberately takes a long time to pack his equipment. So when the house is dead quiet, he can use the excuse that he's missing something to disappear.

He apparates to where he knows he can find her. Once he gets his bearings, he walks in the direction where the wind blows the strongest. It leads him to the river. And she's there, silhouetted against the flurry of lights from the opposite bank.

She's different tonight, he thinks. As he approaches, she doesn't turn to face him. Instead, she remains still, arms-crossed. Her collar isn't smoothened, and her shirt spills untucked from her skinny pants. Her unrestrained hair floats with the wind, as she stares at the river like a discarded fairy-tale character. When he takes a place on her right, her first question startles him:

"How's she taking it?"

He waits – waiting for her to turn to him. But when she doesn't she settles himself into the same position as her, leaning over the railings that separate him from the charcoal-black water flexing below.

"Not very well. She's worried."

"So am I," she says, without turning. "You're heading into a war."

"She said the same thing. You know I have no choice. It comes with the job."

"But this – this is a different kind of war." She pauses, wipes the hair from her face, then jams her fists into her armpits. "No dark lord, no world at stake. You won't come back from this a hero."

He thinks of Harry, halfway across the world, moving through the dark on another mission. And before he can help it, he fires back: "The world doesn't need anymore heroes, Cho."

He doesn't want another walking-back-in-silence, so he takes her by the arm, and pulls her away from the waterfront.

The streets greet them with silence, the flittering of shadows and light, the coughing of cars going too fast. Ron leads Cho past traffic lights blinking their cryptic colour combinations onto deserted roads. There're no signs, no masses of people, no white smoke, no scent of burning – cold air douses his face with these memories – only this time he's with Cho and there's nothing threatening them except his own circumstances.

Her fingers slip into the spaces between his. For a moment, he stops at another junction, the sleeping city glowing before him in a haze of no parking signs, shuttered shops and glassy-eyed windows.

"You ready?" he asks.

And when Cho tightens the knot linking their fingers together, he breaks into a run.

* * *

><p><strong>10<strong>.

First: he wakes to the voice of the news announcer's voice on the TV. The voice, omniscient, with a commanding officer's insistence, narrating a story, a story he'd been waiting all month to hear.

Second: warmth, the sticky luscious friction of it. He breathes in the bodily perfume at the small of Cho's back, where her muscles cascades away into the wings at her shoulder. Her hair curtains his eyes, and the world looks much simpler when viewed from this angle. His hands are caught under her in the area where their sweaty, fleshy bodies join. He breathes in deeper.

Third: she stirs. Her legs and his remain braided under the sheets. She backs into his crotch. He lands a kiss on her upturned cheek. And he disengages.

He sits up, surveying the landscape of their bed, now looking like a war zone with the wreckage of their clothes everywhere. His full-battle order and equipment for his long journey south wait patiently by the dresser. He doesn't know the time: the only light in the room comes from the Sony flatscreen and the woman who's speaking within it.

She speaks like a neighbour peering through the window of a distant world, mouthing words like _coalition__forces,_ _pre-emptive__strike_, _shock__and__awe_ and _Baghdad_. He waits, waits for the background which he knows will always accompany Muggle news.

And then he gets to see it. The woman disappears, and all that remains is her voice. He sees an image of a city at night, its blues and maroons flooding the screen. He sees strange-looking buildings, all sand-coloured, the tall edges of minarets and palm trees. And then: red-black-orange. Fire-flame-smoke.

The fierce, intense colours fill the room. A stroke of daytime at night in that distance city. The colours flicker off Cho's bare skin, turning it dark, like meat that's been in water too long. He watches it illuminate, and then die away as more pictures fill the space on the screen.

There's a dusty street, people waving, palm trees and a great crystal river in the background. There's children and stout looking men and laughing girls. There's the city I'm going to, he thinks. There's grain-coloured uniforms, armoured vehicles and gunfire there too.

Cho turns to him. And he sees everything reflected in her eyes.

"Will you remember –" she starts.

"You won't forget us here, will you?" she says.

The warmth feels like a scar across the entire length of his abdomen and chest. He matches Cho's words to those Hermione said hours ago, and the impending threat answering. He watches the bombs, gunfights, tanks blowing smoke across a serene spring landscape. He buries a finger into the bed, watching Cho watch him.

He wants to answer like he answered Hermione: "I will write – I promise –". But he feels like he's said this before. So he just lets the sounds from that place far away speak for him, echoing through the room.

* * *

><p><strong>NOTES:<strong>

_I wrote this in a flash of inspiration in between the two Deathly Hallows movies. Beyond that, there's no apparent reason for this at all, apart from just wanting to explore Ron's character. _

_A bit torn as to whether I should still write more HP fanfics. Reviews are definitely appreciated. _

_6.11.11_


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